The Case of the Walking Dead
by NoxLamiarum
Summary: "Dead people don't walk around, Sherlock. I would know, I'm a doctor!"  "When you've eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be true."  Sherlock/Watson Bromance
1. Chapter 1

_From the Blog of Dr. John Watson_

I've been waffling about writing an account of these events—which are undoubtedly still on everyone's mind—but I've finally decided to tell the story, with all the facts, even the rather embarrassing and/or gruesome ones. I am doing this partly because all the facts will eventually be common knowledge anyway, and my blog only has three subscribers (Hello there, DI Lestrade, Sergeant Donovan, and Sherlock!) so it's not likely anyone will ever read this who doesn't already know all the embarrassing bits.

You know from my previous post ("The Great Game") that Moriarty very nearly got himself blown up by a pool, and myself and Sherlock with him. Fortunately, he skipped off with a few more threats and actually let us leave. What he said to Sherlock, though, about burning the heart out of him, didn't seem like idle words, and they stuck with me, made me paranoid. I guess getting kidnapped will also do that to a man.

Sherlock drove himself mad trying to find some way to get to Moriarty. He was hell to live with for the next few weeks, always pacing around in the middle of the night, and really, I have enough trouble sleeping without him muttering things to himself and trying to stomp through the floorboards. And I don't even want to talk about the violin-playing.

On the morning that my story begins, I woke up feeling terrible, but I chalked that up to my obnoxious flat-mate having kept me up all night again and went to work anyway. A few hours into it, though, I began to think I was actually sick—just a cold, but still, no one wants to visit a sick doctor, so I headed home early.

When I opened the door to our flat, Sherlock jumped so violently and looked so horribly guilty that for a second I thought I'd walked in on him masturbating or something, but then I saw the syringe in his hand. Up until that point, I'd never really believed that Sherlock was capable of such monumental stupidity as using drugs, despite the evidence for it. And yet there he was, lying on the couch in his pajamas and his robe, needle about to pierce his skin.

I was angry, disappointed, and worried all in the same instant, and I crossed the room in a hurry and snatched the thing out of his hands, shouting obscenities and various negative things about his character and intelligence. He let me take the drugs (cocaine, as it turned out) and he hardly seemed to have the energy to give me a mean look for my trouble.

"What are you doing?" I snapped.

"What does it look like?" he answered, letting his head fall limply onto the arm rest. "Give it back," he protested, "I bought them, they're mine."

"I'm not going to let you bloody kill yourself. I'm a doctor!"

He raised his eyebrows at me and gave me a look that said clearly, "Well, I don't think you're much of one." What he actually said was, "Relax, I'm not going to kill myself. I know what I'm doing."

"And if you get carted off to prison, how will I make rent?" I continued, and he sighed, sitting up.

"I can't take it anymore, John. I need a distraction. There are no good cases, and no leads." He meant for finding Moriarty, of course. His eyes looked haunted. It was the worst I'd ever seen him.

"Drugs aren't the answer."

He snorted. "Funny thing for a doctor to say."

"I meant recreational drugs."

"Stop being a busy-body," he grumbled, standing up rather more swiftly than I was expecting. "Give them back."

I held them away from Sherlock, which was a futile effort considering how much longer his arms are than mine. He lunged for them, I dodged; he pursued, I made a run for it, not really knowing where I was heading with a syringe full of cocaine but knowing that I couldn't just give it back to him. Of course, Sherlock caught up with me almost immediately (I think I'd decided on the kitchen sink at that point) and practically tackled me. I wasn't expecting it, so I fell over—thank God the syringe went flying across the room instead of getting jabbed into my organs. It slid under the refrigerator, and Sherlock pounced off of me and went after it. I caught his foot and it was_ his_ turn to lose his balance and fall.

This was about the time Mrs. Hudson came in. "Oh, my," she said, "Sorry to interrupt dearies, but there's a young woman here to see you, Sherlock."

"Show her up," Sherlock said, far more casually than you would expect from a man who was just literally scrambling across the kitchen floor after a fix. Standing up dignifiedly, he straightened his robe and looked down at me. "Really, now. Stop acting so childish. What I do with my veins is my own business." He stepped over me and went into the living room.

Not wanting to be lying about the kitchen floor when a guest arrived, I got up too, then sat down angrily in the armchair.

Molly walked in, surprising both of us. She looked nervous, as usual when she was around Sherlock, and more than a little hesitant.

"Yes?" he barked, making her jump, "What is it?"

"Well, um, Sherlock. Did you happen to, er, _borrow_ anything from the morgue today?"

"I haven't even been there. Why?" His last questions was accompanied with that piercing-gaze thing he does so well.

"It's just that one of the bodies has gone missing."

"How do you misplace a corpse?" I asked incredulously, almost laughing. They didn't look amused.

"What happened, Molly?"

"Well," she began, sitting down on the edge of the couch, "I had just gotten a body in for autopsy. Car accident, young fellow, just came through the ER, dead on arrival. He was on the slab, but I hadn't even gotten a chance to take his clothes off when I got a phone call. It lasted about five minutes. When I went back to the table, he was gone."

"Did anyone else enter the morgue while you were taking the call?" The languid Sherlock of only a few minutes ago was completely gone, and in his stead was the Sherlock that is nothing but energy and motion. It's always uncanny to see him shift moods like that.

She shook her head. "No one came in. I was right by the door, I would have seen them."

"What about the fire exit?"

After a moment I remembered there was a fire door on the far side of the morgue from the main door, which led up to the rest of the hospital. Sherlock probably had a whole map of the building in his head.

She gave him an odd look. "That only opens from the inside." Her tone made it clear; Molly was wondering why Sherlock didn't already know that.

"There are ways around that."

I spoke up. "But wouldn't it have set off the alarm?"

"It's not that kind of fire door. It's just a one-way exit, not wired to anything."

"Ah." Well, so much for being helpful. "So you're saying that someone opened the door from the outside somehow and stole a body. But why?"

Sherlock shook his head slightly. "I'm not saying anything. I haven't seen the evidence." Without further delay, he was up and whirring off to his room to change.

Molly and I sat in awkward silence for a moment. I clapped my hands together and said, "Well, I guess that means he's taking the case."

She made a high-pitched whining sort of noise in response. Thankfully, once Sherlock is motivated to do something, he doesn't waste time about it, and he was back in the room soon enough, pulling on his scarf and coat.

One painfully awkward cab ride later, we were in the morgue at Bart's. To me, it looked like it always did. Shiny, a little too clean, you know. Disinfectant smell. Rather creepy, but nothing out of the ordinary, at least to us mere mortals.

We stood by and silently watched Sherlock as he flitted about the room, looking at random things, eyes blazing. He poked and prodded at the fire door for a while, then opened it, inspecting the lock, I imagine.

"No, this isn't right," he said at last, letting the door close. His eyes roamed around the ceiling. "No, no. It's all wrong."

"What's wrong?" I asked impatiently. He was doing that _thing_ again.

"No one came in through the main door," he said, turning around, pacing, running a hand through his hair. "And there's no other way into the room."

"What about the fire door?" I asked.

"No one has opened it from the outside. You can use a wire to flip the latch, but the design of the door makes that harder—the wire would have left marks. There are none. No one opened it from the outside."

"How about—" I looked around, then at the ceiling, "the air vents? They look big enough to—"

But he was shaking his head. He opened his mouth to explain, but Molly, of all people, beat him to it.

"This is a morgue. The air conditioner is separate from the rest of the hospital, a closed system. We keep the air pressure in this room lower than in the rest of the building so when you open the doors, air comes into the morgue instead of out of it."

"Because," Sherlock cut in, "disease would spread otherwise." He narrowed his eyes. "You're a doctor; you should know that."

"I worked with the living, not in a morgue." What they said did ring a bell, though. "Maybe I just deleted that information?" I joked.

He smiled slightly, then continued. "The vents look big enough from here, but where they exit isn't. So no one got in through the vents."

"And there are no other ways. So." I looked around, helplessly. "Who took the body? And how? And_ why_?" That last question was bothering me the most. What was the point in stealing a body? There was some money in selling organs on the black market, but it seemed a stretch to go to such trouble to steal only one at such a risk. Organs were usually sold by the morgue attendants themselves, who had plenty of bodies and lots of time to harvest them. And they didn't take whole bodies. Next of kin tended to notice that sort of thing.

Sherlock met my eye, and I had the sense that he was working through the same questions, only probably at about a hundred times the speed. "Who and why come later. How is what matters now." He pressed his fingers together in front of his lips. After a moment, he frowned deeply.

"Molly, tell me about the body. How did it die?"

"_He_," she answered, emphasizing the pronoun, "died in a car accident. I didn't get a chance to ascertain the cause of death, because it was stolen before I even cut off the clothing, like I said. I assume blunt force trauma—"

"Never assume," Sherlock snapped. "I need to think," he murmured to himself, beginning to pace again. "Arrrgh," he exclaimed, "that's not possible—no. It's just not probable."

"What?" I asked, irate. "Come on, out with it. I know you want to impress us with your genius."

Sherlock walked up to me. "We have established that no one entered and took the body. So that means—"

"The body is still here!" I exclaimed, then glanced around. "But where is it? Who hid it?"

He rolled his eyes. "Molly was the only one in the room aside from the corpse. No one came in. The body is most certainly not still here. And if it's not here, but no one took it, then—?" He ended in a questioning voice, trying to guide me to the answer.

I wasn't seeing it. "I don't know. I mean bodies don't just get up and walk off—"

Sherlock smiled. "Don't they?"

My mouth dropped. "Dead people don't walk around, Sherlock. I would know, I'm a doctor!"

"When you've eliminated the impossible, what remains, _however improbable_, must be true."

I began to laugh. "You really think a dead body just popped out of the morgue for a bit of fresh air? One last go round the city before the funeral?" He opened his mouth to speak, but I kept going. "Are you, Sherlock Holmes—_the_ Sherlock Holmes, the world's only consulting detective—" my voice was dripping with sarcasm, "trying to tell me that a dead man walked out of the morgue on his own?"

"Of course not," Sherlock scoffed, not seeming the least bit insulted by my words, "He wasn't dead."

Molly and I stared at him. "I dunno, Sherlock," she said timidly, "he looked pretty dead to me."

But Sherlock had begun pacing again, eyes darting around frantically. "Molly, has the toxicology report come back yet?"

"How did you—"

Holmes rolled his eyes. "Of course there was a toxicology report. He was in a car accident—driving, wasn't he?"

She nodded. "From what the paramedic said, he was the only one involved. Drove into a pole. The report's not back yet though."

"What was the state of the body when you saw it?"

Molly shrugged. "Some cuts, nothing major. That's why I assumed it was an internal injury that killed him." She emphasized that he was dead, and I have to admit I didn't see how he couldn't be. Not like the first responder would have made a mistake like that, not to mention the doctors upstairs. And I was pretty sure she knew a dead body from a live one.

"Excellent. Yes, that has to be the way," he muttered. I wanted to shake him until he stopped being so annoyingly mysterious.

"Don't you see?" he asked us, knowing full well we didn't. "The man didn't just drift into a pole. He lost consciousness because he'd been poisoned. We'll have to phone up to the lab and tell them to screen for more than blood alcohol content and the usual drugs. There are a few poisons I have in mind—"

"But how do you know he was poisoned?" I insisted.

"Because he wasn't dead. He may have looked it, but he wasn't. How else could his body not be here? No one took it, so it must have taken itself. Think. If you woke up in a morgue, what would you do?"

I thought for a moment. "Probably scream. A lot. Until somebody told me why I was lying on an autopsy table."

"Yes, but you're familiar with the system. You'd recognize the room and know that whoever came when you screamed wouldn't be trying to hurt you. But someone who'd never been in a morgue?"

"So you think he panicked and bolted for the door?"

Sherlock nodded. "Must have. The question now is who poisoned him and why? We need to learn more about the man to find that out. Molly, can you give us his information?"

She gave us his name and address, but before we went to investigate him further, we found the paramedic who was first on the scene of the accident. He was sitting in the break room having tea—or what passed for it there—and Sherlock drilled him with questions about the accident.

We learned a lot of unimportant details, I'm sure, but of course Sherlock wanted to know everything. The paramedic was getting a little annoyed after the first fifteen minutes, but we didn't leave until Sherlock had gotten every little bit from him. The abbreviated version is this:

A woman who witnessed the man—who was named Jeremy Sanderson, by the way—drive into the pole made the call. She stayed on the scene until the ambulance arrived, and told the paramedic what she'd seen. She didn't really notice Sanderson before the accident, so she couldn't say if he'd been conscious or not when it happened. But what she was sure about was that he wasn't conscious after impact, and a few minutes later, when the paramedic arrived, he was dead. Or at least doing a really good job of acting it.

Sherlock was particularly interested in how the paramedic checked to see if the man was alive. He said Sanderson'd had no pulse, wasn't breathing, and was cold to the touch.

As we walked out of the hospital, Sherlock and I exchanged looks, and I said, "I know." He shouldn't have been getting cold, not three minutes after death, if it had even been that long before the ambulance arrived.

"So either a corpse was driving the car, or there was a poison in his system that caused hypothermia. Among other things."

"Like waking up an hour later in a morgue?" I joked. "I suppose Mr. Sanderson will have gotten back home by now."

"We'll see."

* * *

><p>Jeremy Sanderson lived alone in a little townhouse just outside London. No one was home when we arrived, so, naturally, Sherlock picked the lock and we began to snoop around for some clue as to why someone would want to poison our missing body. His place was innocuous enough—I mean he hadn't left us a note explaining why anyone would bother to try to kill him. It was all very middle-class and boring.<p>

I could see the frustration in Sherlock's eyes as he wondered around, undoubtedly learning a great deal of unimportant things about the missing man.

"If he just got spooked and ran out of the morgue, why didn't he come home?" I asked quietly as Sherlock poked around the man's closet.

"Lots of reasons. He's afraid of whoever poisoned him. He's afraid of the police looking for him. He doesn't have fare for a cab."

I snorted. "Maybe we should go to Lestrade about this? Submit a missing person's report." After a bit of hesitation, I continued. "Or go to Mycroft? This seems shady, and we don't have a clue to go on. His people might know something, though."

You'd think I'd suggested we start murdering kittens for fun, the way he glared at me. "We have clues," he insisted. "They just probably lead to dead-ends. We'll know more when Molly texts me about that toxicology report."

As we left the missing man's house, I marveled at how very normal breaking and entering was getting to be for me, and how Sherlock always did an awful lot of illegal things in the pursuit of justice. It didn't bother me, though. Still doesn't.

We'd barely hailed a cab when Molly's text came, and when he read it, Sherlock's face got pale. Paler, I should say. He looked like he'd seen a ghost, or a puzzle he couldn't solve.

"What is it?" I asked nervously.

"I—we need to go back to Bart's." And that was all I could get out of him until we were back in the morgue.

Molly was looking as confused as Sherlock, holding the report out to us as we entered. He took it hastily and scanned it.

"This isn't possible," he murmured. "They must have botched the test. I'll have to run it myself to be sure."

"Can't," Molly said weakly. "They used it all. I was only able to take a small sample before I got that call."

He rubbed his eyes, muttering darkly about idiots. "Call Lestrade," he said eventually, waving his hand in my general direction. "Report Sanderson missing. Maybe those fools will blunder into him and we can get somewhere with this."

I made the call as we left, finally heading back to 221B Baker Street. As we walked up to the door, Sherlock finally got around to telling me about the report.

"There was nothing," he said, a little anger seeping into his normally cold voice. "No alcohol or drugs, but no poisons either, at least not the ones I know of that could have caused a death-like appearance in him. There must be a new one that I haven't heard of yet."

His eyes were almost frantic, and I knew that it would be another night filled with his constant pacing, and my cold hadn't gotten any better, either. No sleep. Again. Wonderful. At least, I reasoned, this had gotten his mind off Moriarty, and off doing drugs just to deviate from the boredom of his existence.

I remembered that the syringe was still under the fridge, so when we got in the flat I went to the kitchen, ostensibly to put the kettle on. The ruse was pointless, since Sherlock went into his room anyway. I got the drugs and disposed of them quickly, but my stealth was for nothing, because when I turned back around, Sherlock was standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at me.

I thought he was going to start in on me about being a busy-body again, but before I could tell him to piss off about the cocaine, I noticed his expression. He looked happy, and Sherlock only looks happy for one reason.

Silently, he held out the phone that Moriarty had sent him, the one modeled after the phone from "A Study in Pink." He carried the thing around obsessively for the weeks following the incident at the pool—he even bought a charger for it—but gradually he began to leave it at the flat, giving up hope that Moriarty would phone him again. Sherlock never let it lose its charge, though, and on the screen there was an image, a new one.

"_He's _behind this, somehow. He's playing with me again." Holmes's voice was excited, eager. He sounded like a kid that's just been told Christmas is coming round again.

I didn't share in his enthusiasm. With a horrible, sinking feeling in my stomach, wondering if I was going to end up kidnapped again, I studied the photo. It was of a vial of blood, wrapped in a pink ribbon, lying on something—tablecloth, maybe, or a blanket. After a second, I realized the blanket looked oddly familiar, friendly even.

The color drained from my face. It was my blanket, the one on my bed upstairs. I wasn't sure if Sherlock had even been in my bedroom before, so I assumed he hadn't realized what this meant. Moriarty had been in my room. _My room!_ The sense of outrage I was experiencing had a very teenager tint to it, but I didn't care. That absolute creep of a super-villain had been nosing about my stuff. And he'd left Sherlock a present there.

"John? What's wrong? You've gone all pasty."

"Think you'd better come upstairs with me," I said, annoyed at how afraid I sounded.

He gave me a look that implied he was trying to understand the immense stupidity of a lesser being. "Why?"

"Because your biggest fan left you something there."

* * *

><p>AN: Any inaccuracies relating to British English are due to the fact that I'm American. Any inaccuracies about anything else are due to the fact that I'm prone to failure.

Also, this story will eventually contain slight Sherlock/John moments, nothing approaching explicit, of course. Fair warning!

Reviews are greatly appreciated! This story will probably end up being stupidly long, and if you have suggestions/ideas and such, feel free to tell me.

Thanks for reading!


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Oh, hello there! I'm happy you've made it this far in reading. Some things to mention before you continue (if you care to read them):

This is my first _Sherlock_ fic, so I'm slowly getting into the characters. I feel this chapter is stronger than the first in that respect, and hopefully it will improve as I move through the really silly and insane plot I have planned.

Also, I have to mention that this story contains something I generally hate in fan-fiction-the presence of original characters. But in the books/short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there is almost always a client that Sherlock and Watson are working for, so I've added one. There may be other minor roles filled by random people later on, but I'm not going to make my own creations into the main focus, because they're just tools to move the plot forward.

In other words, it's still about Sherlock and John, but since the cast of the show is so small, I had to invent at least one person to fill a key role.

Now, on with this crazy thing!

* * *

><p>Rarely had I been that hesitant to enter a room, and the fact that it was <em>my<em> room made it all the worse. We stood by the door for a long moment, Sherlock giving me a "Well, go on!" look, then he got tired of waiting and barged in himself. I don't know what I was expecting—an explosion, maybe—but it was very anticlimactic. There was just my room, as it always was, and a vial of blood on the bed.

"Is anything different?" he asked me, eyes darting around.

"No, nothing that I can see. Not like Moriarty came here to steal from me," I joked, but it fell flat. Cue awkward laugh. I was still having trouble coming to terms with the fact that my flat-mate's archenemy had invaded my home. 221B Baker Street is my refuge from the mad, horrible world out there, and my room is my refuge from the mad, horrible experiments Sherlock leaves lying about the place. I never had to worry about finding any body parts or caustic chemicals in my room. I never had to worry about my own safety in my bloody flat, but of course now I did.

And Sherlock was currently making about a billion deductions about me while he flitted about the room, no doubt. I guess when you're living with the world's only consulting detective you can't expect to have privacy.

At last Sherlock began to study the vial, pulling out his little magnifying glass and checking for fingerprints and who knows what else. He removed the ribbon carefully. "I can only assume this is a vial of Jeremy Sanderson's blood. Moriarty—"

"I thought you didn't assume," I cut in.

He rolled his eyes at me and said, "Shut up. I suppose Moriarty decided to give me this clue when he found out the first sample had been used up."

"How does he know all that? Do you think he's got cameras—"

"Not important."

"Well excuse me if I find the idea of Moriarty watching me undress—"

"I highly doubt that would be his motivation for putting up cameras in our flat."

"Oh, right, forgot, he'd be watching _you _undress, then?"

Sherlock ignored that and turned back to his analysis of the vial and ribbon. "He was very careful not to leave any clues on the ribbon or the glass. All I can tell from this is that he has no sense of color theory—really, this shade clashes with the color of blood terribly. It matches the phone exactly. He put this in your room to make you feel threatened, I imagine. He wants us both to know that you're part of the game, now, not just an observer. If I lose, you lose too."

Giving me a look that was almost apologetic, he continued in a softer voice. "Offering to die for me probably made him take you seriously."

At the time, by the pool, what I did had been half impulse, half logic. Sherlock was the only man capable of stopping Moriarty. I was nobody, just his flat-mate who followed him around while he solved impossible cases. Sherlock claims that when I make bad deductions, come to false conclusions, etc., he is able to see the truth more clearly, that my wrongness illuminates the path for him.

I didn't believe a word of it. Sherlock was brilliant before he met me, and he'd be brilliant without me. What I was to him is an audience for his genius. I thought that was why he kept me around, and so when the choice arose, I decided that it would be best for the world to save Sherlock at a great personal cost. When I joined the army, I knew that I might one day give my life for Queen an country, and just because I'd left the service didn't mean I'd changed my mind about that.

What surprised me the most was that Sherlock didn't run when I told him to. At that moment I wondered if I really was more than an audience for him, someone to say "Brilliant!" when he made his deductions. I realized that I might actually be his friend.

Moriarty realized that, too, of course, which I could have done without at that point.

"I wouldn't take it back even if I could," I replied.

"Mycroft was right."

"About what?"

"That bravery is the kindest word for stupidity." But he was smiling at me as he spoke. "We have to go back to Bart's. I need to test this blood for—everything. The poison must be something new."

When we got to the hospital, I realized I hadn't eaten anything all day. Unlike Sherlock, I do in fact have to consume food while working on a case, so I went off to the cafeteria while he began running his tests. I ran into Molly there, and we shared a table.

It was a bit awkward at first, since I didn't know her well, and she kept forgetting my name anyway. This was the first time I'd seen her when Sherlock wasn't around, and she seemed far less nervous, far less like a mouse.

"So Sherlock's in the lab?" she asked, moving her food around on her plate, feigning casualness.

"Yes, running some tests," I answered vaguely. I didn't exactly want to go around telling everyone that a madman had broken into our flat and left us some blood.

"Another all-nighter?" It was approaching dusk now. I nodded.

"Most likely."

"I'll bring some coffee round later for him then. I know how he likes it."

Her words sounded so hopeful, and it just about broke my heart. Her infatuation with Sherlock was obvious to everyone, and I couldn't imagine that Sherlock didn't realize. Not even he was that obtuse.

Something of my feelings must have shown on my face, because Molly looked at me for a moment and said, "I know he won't ever give me the time of day, Dr—"

"John Watson," I supplied.

"—but I can't help it. Can't change how I feel," she murmured, turning her face back to her food, almost curling over it. "You're lucky. He cares about you."

"It's not like that," I said, almost getting used to people assuming things about my relationship with Sherlock.

"I know. But he still cares about you more than anyone else."

My laugh was more than a little awkward. "Well, I do help him pay the rent," I said, trying to brush aside her comment. I would never have expected Molly to be so frank with me, and I wondered if she was suffering from sleep deprivation or something.

Before I could say anything else, though, she started, glancing at her watch. "Oh, I've got to get going." And with that, she was off, leaving me alone with my thoughts and my mediocre hospital food.

Sherlock was where I expected, hunched over a microscope in the lab. He didn't even glance up as I walked in, but he said, "John, nice of you to join me. I've made an interesting discovery."

"What's that?"

"Sanderson's white-blood-cell count was high."

"He was sick."

"Meaning that he could have had an unrelated illness, or it was the illness itself that caused the death-like symptoms."

I sat down on a stool next to him. "Which do you think it was?"

A long moment passed before he answered. "An illness. Moriarty chose Sanderson, but it's not likely he was chosen for any particular reason. Like the bomb hostages. So if Sanderson had been sick, why would Moriarty pick him to poison? An illness could have interfered with his plans."

"Which are?"

Finally Sherlock looked up from the microscope, giving me that exasperated expression he does so well. "I don't know yet. But I will. There's clearly a large piece of the puzzle that we're missing."

Nodding, I thought for a moment. "Virus or bacteria?"

"Viral, I imagine. Otherwise, what's the point?" He stood up. "We'll need a better microscope to look for it though."

Touching his arm, I stopped him from hurrying after an electron microscope. "Will seeing it really help us?" I asked. "Shouldn't we turn our attention to finding Sanderson?"

Sherlock met my eyes. "It's likely that Moriarty has him, because he acquired the blood sample." He looked away. "This is different from the first game. There's no clear crime, unless it's—" His blue eyes grew wide, and his lips parted slightly in a silent exclamation. "Good heavens, he can't possibly have—" And then Sherlock turned and practically ran out of the room.

I followed him fast enough to see which turns he made, and after a minute or so we were in a different lab. Pausing by the door to catch my breath, I saw what we'd come for—the electron microscope. Sherlock had brought the vial of blood with him, and soon he had an image up on the monitor.

"Viral. Fantastic," I said dryly, looking at the otherworldly little half-alive creature on the monitor.

"Well," Sherlock began, "tell me what you see, doctor."

I moved over to stand beside him, bending to get a closer look. "It's an enveloped icosahedral, which narrows it down about none at all. Virology isn't my area, sorry. That's all I can tell you about it."

"Luckily we have a computer," he said cheerfully, rapidly typing on the keyboard. "Probably won't help, since I doubt this is something boring like HIV or the flu. I have a feeling it's new, and very nasty."

"Do you think Sanderson is dead?" My voice was almost a whisper.

"Perhaps. But I think before he went, if he is, he spread this virus to a large number of others—"

"No, maybe he didn't. The virus could be transmitted through saliva or blood. The envelope makes that likely."

"Hm." That was about as close I'd get to Sherlock saying I was right, that I'd thought of something he hadn't. Well, I _am_ a doctor, and you don't get an M.D. by collecting bottle caps. "Don't suppose he's out sleeping with everyone he can, so if the virus is only transferred through blood, what's the point?"

"You'll have to ask Moriarty, I think," I answered.

"Well you know I keep asking him round for tea, but the man just won't accept my invitation."

The computer chimed, and Sherlock frowned at it. "No matches, though if it were that easy, it would be dull."

"What now?"

He closed his eyes, resting his fingertips together and touching them to his lips. "This game differs from the first in a few significant ways. First, there has been no bomb threat. Secondly, there has been no clear crime, unless someone gave Sanderson a virus on purpose, which is unlikely, considering it isn't in the database. That means that Sanderson is filling the role of the hostage, and the virus itself is the bomb."

"So, where's the puzzle to solve, then?"

"Dunno. Perhaps Moriarty is waiting, establishing the new set of rules." Standing, he gathered his coat and scarf and hastily put them on. "There's nothing else I can accomplish here. I need to think on all this."

We took a cab back to Baker Street, and I put on some tea, preparing for a long night of not being able to sleep because of Sherlock's pacing and my continued head-cold. As I settled into the armchair, he began to play the violin erratically, ignoring my glares. For a while I tried to read, then gave up on that foolish idea and simply sat, sipping tea and staring at the far wall, listening to Sherlock play.

Hours passed, and eventually the tone of the music (if I may be so bold as to call it that) changed into something softer, almost bearable. I'd slipped into a light doze when the screaming started.

With a start, I jumped up and ran to the window. Outside the street was almost completely empty, but running down the sidewalk in the direction of our flat was a small figure, and a larger one was chasing it. The screams were undeniably that of a child, and it made my blood run cold. Grabbing my gun, I sprinted down the stairs and into the night, just in time for the child—a little blonde girl—to barrel into me.

"Help! Help! Kill it!" was about the gist of what she was screaming at me, though her tears made her hard to understand. She was also pointing frantically at the person who was following her.

The man was coming towards us, about thirty meters away, and the way he was moving, well, I can only really describe it as _lurching_. At first I thought he must've been drunk or something, but a small, terrified, primal part of my brain recognized that there was something very, very wrong with him. It wasn't a drunken stagger; it was an erratic, jerky, limping, awful movement. His head was twitching to one side, and over the child's frantic commands I heard him—a noise was coming out of him that the human voice was never meant to make. He sounded like a rabid animal, moaning and snarling, enraged.

The girl saw the gun in my hand and tugged at the sleeve of my shirt, shouting now, "Shoot it in the head! Shoot it in the head! It's the only way!" over and over.

I aimed the gun at the man, saying firmly and loudly, "Stop right there, or I'll shoot." I wasn't sure why the girl was running from him, but at the moment I was more than willing to take her word that he was dangerous. He was wearing a business suit, but it was rumpled, torn, and stained with something that looked an awful lot like blood. Though his eyes were locked on me, he didn't seem to even notice the gun, and his gaze gave me goose-bumps.

"John, we better get back inside." I hadn't noticed that Sherlock had come down with me, but now he was gripping me by the wrist that wasn't holding the gun and urging me back into the flat. "He's not right."

The man was only a few meters away now, and up close he was even more frightening, so I took Sherlock's advice in a hurry, grabbing the girl and dashing back inside. Sherlock bolted the door behind us, and a few seconds later I heard the man scratching and pawing at the door, still moaning and growling.

"Upstairs, now," I said, and the girl followed without a word, still crying loudly. "Sherlock, phone the police."

He nodded, not even refusing because he preferred to text. Clearly even he was a little disturbed by what had just happened, and as he dialed the number, I led the girl to the armchair and sat her down, saying, "It's alright now, dear, you're safe. You can tell us what happened when you're ready. Er. Would you like some tea?"

After a moment she shook her head. "Hot tea _s-s-sucks_!" And began sobbing anew.

"Oh, God, tourists," Sherlock said disdainfully. I didn't have to ask him how he knew she was a tourist—she was wearing pajama pants with a cartoon sponge on them and an oversized "I Heart London" t-shirt. On her back was a bag in the shape of a black cat, and it looked like it was stuffed within an inch of its life. She also wasn't wearing any shoes, just those fuzzy house-sock things. "_American_ tourists."

"Are the police on their way?"

"Wh-what do you mean, '_American_ t-t-tourists'?" she demanded in an uncanny imitation of Sherlock's tone.

He ignored her and answered me instead. "Line was busy, and Lestrade isn't answering his phone. I imagine they have their hands full."

"Full? With what?"

"D-don't ignore me!" the girl said, her sobs beginning to subside. "I hate adults! We have to kill that thing or it'll get in and eat us!"

"What thing?" I asked, trying to keep my voice gentle. I've never really been good with kids, but I was pretty sure I was better than Sherlock, so it fell to me to keep her calm until we got this sorted out.

"The zombie!" she screamed. "There's a zombie trying to get inside!"

"Don't be ridiculous," Sherlock said in a mean voice.

"You're both so stupid! You saw it, it was totally a zombie! Why didn't you shoot it?" she continued, turning on me. "You had your gun pointed right at it!"

"I'm not going to shoot a man for no reason—"

"He's not a man anymore! He's a _zombie_!"

"Listen, little girl—"

"I have a name!"

"Where are you staying? We'll take you back there and find your parents—"

"My parents are _dead_!" she shrieked, then began sobbing again.

That was enough to give Sherlock pause, and he looked at me. We could still hear the man outside. He was banging on the door now, louder than ever.

"Who'd be calling this late?" came Mrs. Hudson's voice from downstairs, and Sherlock's eyes grew as wide as mine must've.

"Mrs. Hudson—don't answer it!" he shouted as we sprinted down the stairs, but it was too late. We heard her scream and the sound of a body falling before the scene came into view.

The man must've opened the door violently and knocked her down, and now he was lurching towards her, hands outstretched. I didn't think, I just acted, shooting him square in the heart. He fell over, quite dead, at Mrs. Hudson's feet, her screaming and the sound of the shot overwhelming in such a small space.

Sherlock closed and bolted the door, frowning at the dead man, then at me. "Well, there's no avoiding the court case for this one," he spat, "But I suppose there was no other way."

The little girl had followed us downstairs, and when she saw the body, she screamed, but instead of running back to the flat, she pounced at me, grabbing for the gun, which I held above my head out of her reach.

"Double-tap!" she was yelling, "You have to double-tap it! Shoot it in the head!"

"Shut up, little girl, I am trying to think!"

"My name is Allie and I'm not little! I'll be eleven next month!"

Mrs. Hudson had regained her feet with my aid, and she asked, "What's going on here? Who was that man, and what was wrong with him?"

"He was sick," Sherlock answered before Allie could start in with the zombie nonsense again. "And I'll wager there are dozens more like him out there. Jeremy Sanderson was patient zero," he added to me. "You saw this man, he was clearly suffering from some neurological disorder—lack of coordination, impeded powers of speech—something like rabies, but with a much shorter incubation period. Probably more infectious, too. Unfortunate that you had to kill him, but he would likely have spread the disease further if he wasn't stopped."

"You don't think it's airborne?" I asked, watching the corpse warily.

"If it were, we would have seen someone infected before now. Sanderson would have spread it to Molly, in all likelihood, but she was fine when we saw her." Sherlock knelt by the body, causing Allie to make a loud, nervous noise that wasn't quite a scream.

"He's dead," I said to her softly, "you don't have to be afraid."

"But you didn't get his brain. He'll come back to life and bite the tall guy," she answered in a whisper, wide blue eyes locked on the dead man's face.

"Zombies aren't real," I insisted gently. "He was just very, very sick."

Sherlock made an "Aha!" noise, then motioned me over. Leaving the girl to cling to Mrs. Hudson, I knelt beside the body.

"Look at this, it's the site of infection." He pointed a gloved hand to a bite mark on the man's arm. With horror, I realized it was a human bite mark, and it had gone very deep, more than deep enough to break the skin.

"We should try phoning the police again," I said, looking sadly at the bullet wound on the man's chest. "The longer we wait, the worse it'll look on us. Me, I should say, as I'm the one who shot him."

"I doubt we'll get through. Think of how many others like this one are out there. We need to focus on what's important—"

"—getting Allie squared away," I cut in, but he talked over me.

"—solving the puzzle Moriarty's given me."

We glared at each other for a long, silent moment. At last I whispered, "And we what, just leave the little girl to fend for herself? She said her parents were dead, one of these infected people could have killed them. She's traumatized, no other relations this side of the Atlantic, I imagine, and the bloody police won't answer the phone, so they can't come get her. We'll have to take her to the station ourselves."

"Too risky," Sherlock responded, shaking his head. "Can't chance getting infected. Need to figure out Moriarty's game from here."

I stood up. "Well, I'm going to take her, then. You and Mrs. Hudson stay upstairs and lock the door." Without waiting for an answer, feeling angrier with Sherlock than I ever had before, I climbed the stairs two at a time and went to my room. I filled my spare magazine with bullets, and, on second thought, put the whole box of them in my coat pocket.

On my way back downstairs to the entryway, I said, as I neared Sherlock, who was still examining the body, "Probably want to cover that up or something. I'll tell Lestrade what happened. Should be easy to get off on self-defense, since he attacked Mrs. Hudson."

Sherlock looked up at me for a moment, and he seemed almost sad, and there was hesitation in his eyes. But then he turned away, and so did I. "Be careful out there, John. I'd hate to see you like this," he motioned to the body.

I found Allie and Mrs. Hudson in her living room, the latter telling the girl an amusing story and offering her biscuits. I motioned them over to the doorway, saying to my landlady, "You should go upstairs with Sherlock, Mrs. Hudson. There are probably more people about like the man who charged in here. I'm going to take Allie to the police station so they can help her find her parents."

"My parents are dead," she said softly. She'd stopped crying, but here eyes were red and her face was blotchy. "I don't want to go outside, there are zombies. I don't want to be a z-zombie." Tears were welling up in her eyes.

I sighed. "I won't let them get you, I promise."

"B-besides," she continued, "I'm not supposed to talk to strangers. I d-don't even know who you are—or where I am!"

"My name's John Watson," I said, "and I was a soldier, so I can handle a little trouble from sick people in the streets." With a small dry smile, I added, "And you're at 221B Baker Street."

"Wh-who's the mean tall guy? And why's he dressed up?"

I barely stopped myself from laughing. "That was Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the world's only consulting detective. He always looks like that, I don't know why."

"He's stupid and I hate him."

I shrugged. "And he always makes that impression on people. He's a genius in his own way, and an idiot in all the others. Come on, we should go."

She stomped her foot. "I told you, I'm not leaving! I don't want to be a zombie!"

"I have to get in touch with the police because I killed that man, and we need to bring you to them so we don't get charged for kidnapping, too. You need to tell them what happened to your parents."

She hesitated, staring down at her socked feet. "I don't want to get you in trouble Mr. Watson. I'll go."

It was cold outside, so I asked her if she had anything warmer than pajamas in her bag. She informed me that the change of clothing she had with her wasn't any warmer, and she hadn't brought a coat on her vacation.

"I'm from Florida," she said matter-of-factly, "We don't really have a winter. And apparently you don't have a summer." Her tone made it clear she disapproved of London, but in London's defense, it usually isn't filled with zombies.

Mrs. Hudson lent her an old coat, and we made our way to the door. Sherlock was still in the hall with the body, but his examination seemed to have dissolved into pondering what he'd seen. He didn't look up as we passed, but when my hand closed around the doorknob, he said, "Take care of yourself, John."

"You do the same."

I closed the door behind us, staring out into the empty night. My gun was in my right hand, and silently Allie took my left in hers. And in the distance there was a faint noise that was the mingled sound of screaming and police sirens.


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: Hello there! Thanks for reading this far! I have some really fun stuff planned for this ridiculous fic, so I'm really excited to be moving along with it.

Thanks to my one reviewer so far! Every review really encourages me and fills me with warm fuzzies!

* * *

><p>The first dozen meters or so away from the flat were the most stressful. I had no idea how many infected people might be running around out there, or if the man who'd been chasing Allie was the only one on the block. Every shadow could be hiding a zombie.<p>

Yes, I'll admit that I'd taken to thinking of them as zombies, even though I knew better. But what's in a name, right? _Zombie_ was as good a term as any for them, slightly easier to say than _infected_. As long as I kept my wits about me and didn't start thinking that they were corpses walking around, I'd be fine.

Allie, however, seemed sure that they were the undead, and she was gripping my hand like she was trying to break all the bones in my fingers. We walked in silence for the first block, obviously not wanting to draw attention to ourselves, but after several minutes of not seeing anyone at all on the streets, I began to relax.

The lack of fellow pedestrians wasn't that disconcerting; it was approaching 2 AM on a weeknight, but even so, there was usually _someone_ around. I wondered if the media had picked up the story of the virus, and if the police were urging people to keep off the streets. Likely all the social networking sites were abuzz with fear of the zombie apocalypse and the fall of civilization.

"So you're a soldier?" Allie asked in a whisper suddenly as we made our way quickly down the sidewalk.

"I was, yes," I responded in an equally soft voice.

"Why'd you quit?"

"I was injured."

"Oh." She was quiet for a moment, then continued, "But you don't seem injured now. Are you going back to the army?"

"No, I don't think I will."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm working with Sherlock."

"What do you do?" She'd frowned at the mention of Sherlock. "What's a consulting detective? Sounds made-up."

"He helps the police solve crimes when they need him. And I help."

"Weird." Talking about irrelevant things seemed to have calmed her a little, because the feeling began to return to my left hand.

As we'd been conversing, I'd kept my eyes scanning our surroundings, and so I saw the woman before she spotted us. Immediately I knew she was a zombie—the way they moved was unmistakable. Wordlessly, I pulled Allie into an alcove of a building, hoping she wouldn't scream when she saw the zombie.

The girl was more prudent than I could have hoped; her eyes grew wide and the color drained from her face, but she was still and silent. I didn't want to have to kill anyone else, but I wasn't sure I could risk knocking one of the infected out without running too high a risk of getting bitten. They didn't seem to be able to move more quickly than a fast lurch, so if it came down to it, we could run.

Fortunately, the woman never noticed us. Watching her as she shuffled down the opposite side of the street (going the other way than we were, thankfully), I realized something important. The zombie who had attacked us near the flat had been making a constant racket, but this one was as silent as we were. That meant that the infected only starting making those horrible animal noises when they saw another person. But would they react to other zombies in the same way? Would the infected attack each other?

I didn't have to ponder the question long. A few minutes after we'd seen the first zombie, I peaked around a corner and saw about half a dozen milling around in the street. Two of them began to shamble towards each other, and when they seemed to notice the other, they suddenly began to growl and snarl, jumping at each other. Almost simultaneously, they bit one another. I wanted to look away, afraid of what I was about to see, but nothing else happened. They just lurched away from each other after those bites. Curious.

While it was mildly useful to know that the zombies didn't seem interested in eating one another, their presence in the street posed a significant problem for me. The police station was a few blocks in that direction. I knew that we could just move a street over and circle around, but what if we encountered more? I didn't have Sherlock's complete knowledge of all the back-streets and alleys in London, and it was possible that every path that I knew to the station was swarming with infected.

The higher concentration of them as we neared our destination was also concerning. If the virus had spread more than we'd estimated, then the police would be overcome. The hospitals weren't equipped to deal with hundreds of violent people, people who would spread their sickness through saliva or blood.

Moriarty had knowingly started an epidemic, one that had the potential to become a pandemic. That he was a psychopath was obvious, but I'd thought he'd been a somewhat rational one, with his criminal organizations and such. But what could he possibly stand to gain by dooming the world in such a way?

I remembered that figuring out why this was happening wasn't really my area. What I needed to focus on was getting Allie safely to the police.

The alternate route to the station was almost free of zombies, and we were able to avoid the notice of the few we saw, and at last the police station came into view.

It was swarming with infected.

Beside me, Allie made a strangled, pathetic noise, one that very clearly conveyed her despair to me. I felt about the same. The police were supposed to be a force of order, law, protection. They were who you went to when you needed help—but who would help us now?

The answer came to me easily: the military. They were the only force large enough to handle the outbreak, and I was certain that if the army wasn't securing London yet it would be soon. The best course of action, then, I reasoned as I watched hundreds of infected people claw and bite at each other, would be to return to Baker Street and wait out this crisis, hopefully helping Sherlock solve the puzzle in the meantime.

I stared at the station for a few more moments, wondering what had become of Lestrade and Donovan and the few other policemen I knew by name or sight.

Allie was tugging at my sleeve, so I turned to look at her, but her gaze was fixed on a lone zombie that was shambling down the sidewalk in our direction. He hadn't noticed us when I turned around, but there was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, either, because of the horde at our backs. A second later he saw us and began making that zombie-moan noise.

I raised my gun to fire, but before I could, Allie screamed, and suddenly the air was heavy with the sound of zombies on the rampage for uninfected humans. I didn't have to tell Allie to run because she'd taken off before I did, across the street at a diagonal, away from the lone zombie and the crowd behind us.

I'm a fast runner, so I caught up with her quickly, and together we sprinted in the general direction of Baker Street, which for all I knew was now just as rife with zombies as the police station, but there was nowhere else to go.

The moaning began to grow fainter, and Allie began to slow down, gasping, "I—I hate running—can't—anymore!"

We were jogging now. "Alright," I answered, "But we need to keep well ahead of them."

She nodded back to me. "My feet—hurt. Should have—grabbed—shoes—but—" Her explanation was cut off by the sudden sound of zombies approaching us from the front. Apparently, the large crowd chasing us had drawn the attention of all the other zombies in the area, and they were converging on us.

"Bloody fantastic," I said, chambering a bullet. The sounds were coming from all around us, but I hoped to find a path between them. Looked like my resolution not to kill anyone else was going to be blown to bits, though.

We passed an alley, and on an impulse, I darted into it, pulling Allie along with me by the hand. It was dark, but I didn't hear any zombies down it, so I decided to risk it and hope that it came out somewhere less populated.

I'd put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak, by running down this unfamiliar alley, so of course it was a dead end. The sound of the zombies was growing louder, making the hair on the back of my neck rise, and I knew there was no way we'd get past them now, not without shooting a large number of them.

Not ready to start mass-murdering people, I cast my eyes around frantically, looking for some place to hide or climb out of the alley. The fire escapes were too high to reach, though, and there was nothing we could reliably hide behind.

"M-Mr. Watson," Allie said, tears in her voice, "If I turn into a zombie, promise you'll kill me. Promise!"

"A bit early for murder-suicide pacts, isn't it?" I said, trying to keep my voice cheerful. "No one's going to be a zombie. We'll get out of here."

I heard the clatter of soles on a fire escape, and I whirled around, aiming my gun at the noise, afraid that a zombie had climbed out of one of the flats. But in the dim light I saw that the person was still healthy, human, and it only took me a second to recognize the silhouette.

"Sherlock?" I asked, bemused enough to forget the life-threatening situation I was currently in the middle of. He didn't answer until he'd lowered the fire escape, reaching a hand down for me.

"Come on, John, don't want to end up infected now do we?"

But instead of grabbing his hand, I picked Allie up and handed her off to him. He pulled her up effortlessly and set her down beside him with the carelessness one handles, say, a sack of potatoes, but if she noticed his indifference, she didn't act like it. There was nothing but relief on her features.

"Hurry," he said, reaching down for me, and I didn't waste time about climbing up with his help. We pulled the fire escape back up just as the first few zombies lurched within reach of where it had been hanging. A few of them made half-hearted grabs in the air, but most of them just began to mill around silently, as if they'd forgotten we were ever there.

"They're remarkably stupid," Sherlock whispered in my ear, almost too quietly to understand. "Stupider than people normally are, I mean."

Only _he_ would take time out of a zombie apocalypse to remind me just how much smarter he was than everybody else.

"Well, at least they have an excuse now," I responded in as quiet a voice as he'd used.

"And what's yours?" he asked, a little anger in his voice. "What were you thinking, coming down this alley? You're lucky I've been following you—"

"Yes, why were you following me? After making a show of not wanting to bother trying to get Allie to the police?"

"A few minutes after you left, I checked news sites and realized just how big a problem we're facing. I realized that my original estimate was off by an order of magnitude at least, and that you'd be in serious danger."

"Why didn't you tell me sooner, then?"

He hesitated. "I've been following you on rooftops the whole way. Too dangerous to move around on the streets."

I studied him for a long moment. Even in the low lighting, I could see his face clearly enough to make out his expression, to see the sheen of fear in his eyes. That was something that I didn't see often, and as I stared at his eyes, I realized that Moriarty hadn't just started the zombie apocalypse for his own incomprehensible reasons. He'd designed—or had designed—a virus that was the antithesis of everything Sherlock was.

Moriarty had made a disease that had the potential to turn Sherlock Holmes into a stupid beast. Sherlock's intellect is at the very core of his being, his identity, and Moriarty was threatening that.

_He was terrified of becoming infected_. And Sherlock wasn't afraid of much, so it must have been horrible for him, wanting to be his normal on-a-case self, dashing around constantly, taking action immediately, but unable to risk it.

I resolved that the next time I saw Moriarty, I'd put a bullet in that stupid face of his, regardless of the cost.

"Thank you," I whispered.

"Of course," he breathed, tearing his eyes away from mine and looking around. "We need to get back to Baker Street. She's going to be a problem," he added disdainfully. "It's not an easy path."

"We'll make it," I said firmly. "Let's get going." I looked at the girl; her eyes were locked on the zombies below, and she was trembling.

After a second she glanced at me, then at Sherlock, giving him a withering frown. "Why's he wearing a scarf?" she asked, "Who wears a scarf when it's almost May?"

Her breath was visible in the cold air, and I was about to point that out, but she continued, "He's hiding something! He's been bitten!"

Sherlock rolled his eyes. "I can't see the allure in reproducing. I haven't been bitten, little girl. It's cold out, ergo, scarf. We're wasting time." And with that, he turned around, coat swirling behind him, and began to climb up the fire escape.

I urged Allie to follow him, and I after her, still alert and watchful. Those flats could be full of zombies as well, I reasoned, people who were bitten and went home to treat their wounds, falling asleep human and waking up a monster.

Sherlock had sprinted up a floor more than Allie, and I was only a few steps behind her. Above us, a window exploded, and a zombie launched itself at my flat-mate. It happened so quickly—a swirl of broken glass, the snarl of the thing, and Sherlock's gasp of surprise, more than a little tinged with terror.

With as little hesitation as I'd had when I shot the first infected person—probably less—I raised my gun, aimed, and fired before the zombie had crossed the half-meter to Sherlock. The force of the impact sent it stumbling over the railing, and it fell to the ground with a horrible, squishy, crunchy noise that is only produced when something living hits pavement at a high speed.

I don't like to think about what would have happened if I hadn't been looking up at Sherlock when the zombie broke out of the flat. It still makes my stomach turn.

He stared down at me, nodding his thanks, then looked at the corpse below. I followed his gaze and saw something horrifying—a few of the zombies were eating the dead one.

There were perhaps two dozen in the alley, and only three or four were paying any attention to the body, but that was still startling in its implications. The time for dwelling on it was not now, however, and we continued up the stairs to the roof, happy when all those windows were behind us.

Sherlock didn't slow down, of course, unless it was to wait impatiently for me and Allie to catch up. We raced across building after building, until I had no idea where we were, but trusted that the man leading us knew what he was doing.

And I was actually getting used to this running-around-on-rooftops thing. The time of my life when I didn't do insane things like that seems unreal.

At last we reached a familiar street, and I could see our flat a block down. The street here was far less populated with zombies for whatever reason, but I could still see shapes lurching around aimlessly. Getting into the building was probably going to be a problem unless Sherlock had access inside from the roof.

"We'll have to go to the front door," he said quietly, as if he'd been reading my thoughts. "No way around it."

"There aren't too many on the street; we'll be fine," I reassured him.

"Stop whispering, it's rude!" Allie whispered angrily, "Don't ignore me!"

Sherlock rolled his eyes and continued to ignore her. "Let's go."

And with that, we began to climb down the fire escape, slowly, quietly, to avoid the notice of any zombies that might be nearby. As we reached the last floor's worth of steps, Sherlock's coat began to ring loudly.

The moan of zombies suddenly erupted from—everywhere, it sounded like. The building we were currently climbing down must have been full of infected people, and the ground below had several that I could make out in the dim light. Sherlock cursed loudly, pulling out the Pink Lady's phone (as I had come to think of it, even though it was a copy) and silencing it.

The sound of shattering windows above spurred us into action, and we dashed down the last few steps and hit the ground running, literally. I had to shoot several infected that were closing in on us, my conscience flinching with every bullet that left the barrel, but the cold, logical part of me knowing that allowing them to infect us wouldn't do anyone any good. We had to find Moriarty and make him pay for unleashing the virus on London. Underlying all that, of course, was my basic desire for survival, and my desire to protect the two people with me.

Sprinting onto Baker Street, stealth abandoned because we'd been made already, the three of us stuck close together, Sherlock slightly at the lead, Allie running a little behind me, clutching my hand. A zombie lurched out of an alcove at my left, and time did that weird slow-motion thing it does when you're full of adrenaline and you know that something really terrible is about to happen. I couldn't get my gun aimed at it quickly enough, and by the time the bullet spun through its skull, it had grabbed Allie. I didn't see if it had bitten her or not, but she was absolutely distraught, screaming in a way that was borderline hysterical, and nothing I said could make her start running again. She just stared down at the dead zombie, panicking.

A large group was approaching us, I assume most of them from the building we'd climbed down, but before I had a chance to try to pull Allie along with us, Sherlock had dashed back to her and, picking her up with minimal effort, gave me an annoyed look, as if the whole horrible night was my fault. I didn't hesitate to follow him, and finally we were back at 221B. Somehow he managed to unlock the door swiftly without putting the girl down, and then we were all inside, panting, door bolted behind us—keeping the moaning, growling infected out of the flat.

Poor Allie had collapsed into a heap of traumatized, psychologically scarred sobs at Sherlock's feet. He and I stared at each other for a long moment, undoubtedly sharing the same thought: Had she been bitten? And if she had, what on Earth were we to do about it?

I knelt beside her, saying in as kind a voice as I could muster, "Allie, dear, are you alright? Did it—" But I couldn't even ask her.

She understood my half-spoken words, and said through tears, "N-No! It didn't b-bite me, but it scratched me!" She held out her shaking arm, and there were four long marks on her skin, the middle two bleeding a little.

My heart plummeted. Depending on the virulence of the disease, Allie could be infected, or she could be fine. We'd seen no evidence either way in regards to scratches. All I could do at the moment was take her up to the flat and clean and bandage the wound, then wait to see if she developed symptoms.

While I did all that, Sherlock remained silent, his face unreadable, his blue eyes bright with whatever thoughts he was mulling over. He didn't speak until Allie was curled up in the armchair, having finally stopped crying, face still pale with fear.

"Tell us if you start to feel exceptionally hot or cold," he said matter-of-factly to her.

I gave him my best you're-being-an-insensitive-ass look, but it rolled off him without any results. A long, awkward silence stretched through the room, and in a desperate bid to alleviate it, I blurted, "Well, I'll go make some tea, then."

"I want sweet tea," Allie said. "Hot tea sucks."

"Er," I said. "I'll see what I can do."

While I attempted to figure out how to synthesize sweet tea from what we had on hand (I eventually decided to just make her a cup of tea with far too much sugar in it and then put it in the freezer until it was cold), I heard the other two begin to talk in the living room.

"So what do you _do_?" Allie asked, clearly not any more fond of Sherlock than she was originally by her tone.

Sherlock made an exasperated noise. "I help the police solve crimes."

"So you're a cop?"

"No." His voice was extra flat.

"Are you a forensics guy?"

"I'm a consulting detective."

"Is that like a real detective?"

I couldn't suppress the snort of laughter that escaped me, and I swear I could feel Sherlock glaring at my back.

"I help the so-called 'real' detectives when they can't make heads or tails of a crime—which is always."

"Uhuh." She didn't sound convinced.

"Lived in Florida your whole life, then?" Sherlock asked, his tone suddenly nonchalant.

"Yeah," she answered warily, then said, "Hey, I never told you I was from Florida! How—"

I was curious myself to know how he'd figured that one out. Allie had told me, of course, but Sherlock couldn't have overheard, and I hadn't mentioned it to him. I stood in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the frame, watching him explain—something I've always loved to witness.

"It's very simple," he said, with an air of explaining something basic to an idiot, "You're clearly an American by your accent and your atrocious taste in sleepwear—"

"Jerk," she muttered.

"—and both your tan-line—early for the season—and your preference for cold sweet tea means you're most likely from the Southern States. Your specific American accent says Florida."

"I don't have an accent!"

"Everyone does. Yours is a standard English one, meaning that it's unlikely you hail from any Southern State but Florida. Your lack of tolerance for the cold removes places like Virginia from the possibilities. Southern Florida?"

She nodded, frowning at him suspiciously. "I still think you're stupid. I bet it's Mr. Watson who figures out who did the crimes, and you just walk around looking all mean."

"Doctor," he said, blithely ignoring her insults.

"What?"

"Dr. Watson, not Mister. He's a medical doctor."

"Huh? But he said he was a soldier!"

"He was both. Now he's my assistant."

"Colleague," I said from the kitchen, "And I _am_ still a doctor!"

"But," Allie pressed, "if he's a doctor, then he has to be smarter than you."

Call me crazy, but it was nice to have _someone _defending my intellect, even if it was a ten-year-old girl.

Before Sherlock could give her an appropriately scathing reply, the Pink Lady's phone began to ring again, startling us all.

Pulling it from his coat pocket slowly, he answered it, putting it on speaker phone as he did so.

"Hello?" he asked tentatively.

"My dear Holmes," said a chillingly familiar voice, "It's so nice to phone you without having to go through the trouble of strapping a bomb to someone. Isn't this _nice_?"

"Not really," Sherlock said dryly. "Having fun with your zombie apocalypse?"

"Oh yes, lots. Rather good, wasn't it?"

"Uhm, no, I found it a little clichéd and melodramatic for my tastes. Why don't you stick to being a consulting criminal? This dooms-day thing is a bit out of your league."

"I think not," he said darkly. "I'm pulling it off marvelously."

"Just phone to brag, then? Because I'm a busy man."

"You're not busy, Sherlock Holmes. You're loafing about your flat with your pet dog and that new stray kitten. But you really should be trying to solve my little puzzle."

"Did that ages ago."

"No, you haven't even begun to solve it. The zombie business isn't the puzzle, it's just the stakes. If you don't find me in twenty-four hours, you lose, and the whole world suffers for it."

There was a small click, and the line went dead.

"Who was _that_?" Allie asked after a moment.

"Moriarty," Sherlock and I answered together, then met each other's eye.

Twenty-four hours to save the world. Sherlock was right, this _was_ all very cliché and melodramatic.


End file.
